I was a teenage college football player
Recently my friend Mary sent me a couple of articles from the Knoxville News-Sentinel about University of Tennessee football—a piece about Phillip Fulmer’s final game as head coach and another titled “Faircloth signaled end of era” about UT football in the early ‘60s, the period when I was on the squad.
In 1961 I was a starter at end on the freshman team (at that time freshmen weren’t eligible for the varsity squad), and it seemed that the coaching staff had high hopes for me. One day during practice, my freshman coach came up to me and said, “The General wants to see you.” As it turned out, the legendary athletic director Robert Neyland hadn’t come to the freshman practice field to talk with me, merely to have a look at me in the flesh. And after I’d loped out to display myself, he turned without a word and ambled back up to the varsity practice field.
At the end of spring practice in 1962, as a rising sophomore, I was listed as the #3 tight end on the varsity squad, and since we went both ways (playing offense and defense), that meant I was one of the top 33 players on the team. If things had taken their normal course, I would have been the starter by my junior or senior year.
However, destiny stepped in. I was spending the summer of ’62 lifeguarding and drinking beer when one evening in late July I got a call from UT head coach Bowden Wyatt:
After a minimum of niceties, Wyatt asked, “You been running, Mulkey?”
“Yes, coach, I have,” I replied, trying to sound like I wasn’t under the influence.
“How much do you weigh?”
“220, coach.”
“Hell, you haven’t been running much!” (a pretty fair assessment since I’d put on 15 pounds over the summer)
Coach Wyatt then informed me that he wanted me to report early for fall practice and to get myself to Knoxville within a 
few days.
When I arrived, I found myself among three or four other players who were practicing surreptitiously in the old gym. It seems that a shortage at fullback had developed when one player at that position failed to recover from an injury and another got kicked out of school for stealing and selling textbooks for beer money. So we were being trained to fill in. I also found myself on a salad and steak diet.
Having never played in the backfield, my switch to fullback was unsuccessful. But by the time the coaches had determined that, the regular season was about to begin. So I was redshirted and watched players at my former position move ahead of me.
Though football was more like a tedious slog at UT than a passionate athletic pursuit, life on the redshirt squad was pretty laid back. While the varsity did calisthenics at the beginning of each practice, we disdainfully did wacky warm-ups of our own. Then we spent most of practice simulating the next opponent’s passing attack against the varsity defense, completing most of the passes thrown. To join in the fun, I moved myself back to end. When a play was called on which I was the primary receiver, I inserted myself into the lineup. Otherwise I let a player further down the pecking order run the route.
In addition, we redshirts entertained ourselves by calling plays in the huddle such as “Get Downey” (or whatever other varsity player had fallen into our disfavor). When the ball was snapped, everyone on the redshirt team except the ball carrier threw ourselves at Downey, knocking him down and piling on until the whistle blew. It was a riot (literally and figuratively), though the coaches didn’t seem to be laughing very much. Especially when our target was Pat Canini, the 
starting varsity fullback, whose jaw was broken during a similar escapade.
The fact that the coaching staff would tolerate such tomfoolery was symptomatic of the declining fortunes of the UT football program. General Neyland had died on March 28, 1962, and Coach Wyatt wasn’t hired as athletic director because he lacked a college degree. Wyatt was rumored to have a drinking problem and when he shoved a sportswriter into the swimming pool at an SEC meeting, he almost certainly precipitated his termination as head coach. And a losing season certainly hadn’t helped matters. Running the outdated single wing offense and predictable 6-2-2-1 defense, Tennessee had gone 4-6 that season, beating only weak sisters Chattanooga, Wake Forest, Tulane and Vanderbilt.
Disillusioned with football at Tennessee, especially under these conditions, I drifted toward fraternity life—dating, drinking and gentlemen’s C’s. But I missed life on the gridiron as I had known it in high school—the joy of playing the game and the team camaraderie, as well as the status it provided. So eventually I transferred to a small men’s liberal arts college where those elements were still present and where we won our conference football championship both years I was there. But that’s a story for another time
* * *
From the Knoxville News Sentinel:
Faircloth signaled end of era
November 29, 2008
By Tom Mattingly
The single-wing offense, a staple of Tennessee football since the ascension of Bob Neyland as head coach in 1926, took its last breath this weekend in 1963, as the Vols beat Vanderbilt 14-0 on a cold, wet Saturday on Shields-Watkins Field. It was the final game of a 5-5 season.
Mallon Faircloth, a senior from Cordele, Ga., earned the plaudits of history as the last single-wing tailback, running for 179 yards, including a 72-yard touchdown run. Sophomore Stan Mitchell got the other score after a fumble recovery by sophomore linebacker Frank Emanuel. It was also the final game as head coach for Jim McDonald, hired in June after Bowden Wyatt was let go.
No one billed the game as “Tribute to the Single Wing Day,” but events leading up to and during that weekend made it clear the times were definitely a-changing football-wise on the Hill.
History was in one of its cycles of change, as News Sentinel sports editor Tom Siler wrote in 1970 explaining the landscape of college football 45 years ago.
“The high school boy, by 1964 infected with the virus of pro football, saw stardom ahead,” Siler wrote. “He was playing the ‘T’ in high school, wanted to play the ‘T’ in college, and further prepare himself for the golden years in pro football.”
Thus, Siler said, Tennessee “was defeated before it got started in recruiting until Doug Dickey came along.”
The poster boys for the switch to the “T” from the single wing were both from the Class of 1963, and both were Tennesseans, quarterbacks Steve Spurrier of Johnson City and Steve Sloan of Cleveland. Spurrier ended up at Florida, Sloan at Alabama.
In his book on Ray Mears, Ron Bliss notes that Mears was involved in a momentous plan that might well have changed the course of Tennessee athletic history.
Mears wanted to have Spurrier play basketball and asked him “what it would take for him to sign with Tennessee in football,” knowing that he was too good a football player to come to Knoxville for hoops only.
“Steve told me he didn’t like Wyatt’s wingback offense, and he’d have to change to more of a passing offense before he’d consider coming,” Mears said. “So I went back, told Bowden that, and he responded, ‘I’m not changing my offense for anyone.’”
There was also reverence among the Vol fan base for the glory days under Neyland and Wyatt. “They had grown up on the single wing, loved the matchless precision of it, and naturally hated to see it go,” Siler wrote.
There were also indisputable facts. There hadn’t been a bowl game since 1957, and the Vols were in the upper half of the SEC only once between 1958 and 1963. The record in those years was 30-27-3, not what Vol fans had become accustomed to. Home attendance in 1963 averaged 30,141 in a 51,527-seat stadium. The Vols had finished 10th in the conference in 1962 and eighth in 1963.
There had been highlights, streak-breaking wins over Auburn and LSU in 1959, and lowlights, losses to Chattanooga and Florida State in 1958, but there was a rising feeling the game had passed the single wing by. LSU, Auburn, Alabama, and Ole Miss were acknowledged national powers. Georgia Tech, another rival over the years, was still strong.
Things came to a head at a contentious meeting of athletics board members and key trustees before and after the Vanderbilt game. McDonald was made an assistant athletic director, and athletic director Bob Woodruff was given approval to hire the new coach. The new head man was Arkansas assistant Doug Dickey, Woodruff’s quarterback in the early 1950s at Florida. It was a decision that caught media and fans alike off guard.
After a 4-5-1 record in 1964, Dickey brought Tennessee back to glory in 1965, and the Vols have stayed there over the next decades, with a few, but not very many, rough patches along the way.
Dickey believed strongly in the adage, “If you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.” Coming to the Vols having played for Woodruff and having coached under Frank Broyles, who played for Bobby Dodd, Dickey understood the Tennessee tradition and program.
“The Neyland years were not that far back. Bowden Wyatt had done a great job of coaching wherever he had been. Things had gotten a little out of hand. Some changes needed to be made by the university, and they were.”
The 1963 Vanderbilt game and its aftermath ended one era and started another, passing the torch to a new generation. It was a significant and memorable time in the history of the Tennessee program.
The transition may not have been picture-perfect, but the verdict of history reflects positively on the happenings that last November Saturday.
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